The present invention was developed particularly toward the specific needs of watermelon harvesting, and the description will pertain principally to watermelons although the machine and system is equally usable, and will be used, on other field crops.
Watermelons are currently harvested and taken to the freight depot as follows. First, as a preliminary measure, field laborers called "cutters" move through the fields, locating all ripe melons and cutting their vines and turning them with the yellow side up so that the pickers will know which ones to pick. After this is done, an open truck is driven through roads that are put in the fields between every group of ten rows and field laborers lift the melons into the truck. This is done by the field laborer furthest from the truck picking up the melon in his part of the melon patch and throwing it to the next field hand, so that a bucket-brigade chain is formed, the last link of which is a worker in the truck bed who puts it in the open bed.
There are at least three serious flaws with this process that the instant invention solves. First, obviously only the strongest and healthiest field workers may be used due to the rigor of lifting and tossing, or receiving a tossing, hundreds and hundreds of watermelons all day long. During the harvest season, workers of this type may be hard to come by and may be expensive. Other workers who may be readily available may not have the requisite strength and endurance for the harvest.
Secondly, because some of the melons are handled several times as they are passed from worker to worker and finally tossed up into the worker in the truck, the attrition or loss rate of the melons runs about 10% due to cracking and other damage. Watermelons are actually fairly fragile and should be handled in a manner more delicate than this procedure is capable of.
The third problem with this harvesting system is that once the truck is full of melons, it is replaced with another empty truck and driven to the freight depot where again strenuous manual labor must be exerted to move the melons from the truck bed to the containers in which they are shipped.
As the number and complexity of government regulations, contributions, deductions and payments rises, as does minimum wage, union strength and labor problems, the incentive to ameliorate the above-described highly labor-intensive process rises.